Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

“That’s because you don’t have to listen to it-except when you’re up in my bedchamber, that is,” Krasta said. “When you’re over in the west wing, you probably don’t even know when it’s pitching a fit.”

Instead of answering that, Lurcanio made a steeple of his fingertips. “If you brother the marquis were still alive, do you think he would have done his best to reach you and let you know his situation?”

“Skarnu?” Krasta raised an eyebrow. She didn’t think of her brother much these days-what point, when he hadn’t come home from Valmiera’s debacle? “Aye, I think so. I’m sure of it, in fact.”

Lurcanio eyed her, not as a man eyes a woman but more like a cat eyeing a mouse. She glared at him; she didn’t care for that. More often than not, he ignored her glares. This time, he looked away. “It could be,” he said at last. “The investigators in those parts do not know everything there is to know. They’ve proved that often enough-too often, in fact.”

“What are you talking about?” Krasta asked crossly.

“Nothing,” Lurcanio answered with another fine Algarvian shrug. “It might have been something, but it turns out to be nothing.” He sipped the golden wine he’d ordered, then nodded solemn approval.

“I’ll tell you what,” Krasta said. “If I ever get a letter from my brother-or from anyone else in this Pavilosta-in-the-wilderness place-you’ll be the first to know about it.”

“Oh, I expect I will, my dear-you said so yourself,” the Algarvian colonel answered with a laugh. Krasta took offense at its tone. They might have squabbled some more, but the waiter chose that moment to bring their suppers on a tray. Not even Krasta felt like quarreling when faced with that lovely food. And Lurcanio, having tasted his chicken, said, “Aye, simplicity is best.” He beamed at Krasta. “You prove that every day, my dear.” She smiled back, taking it for a compliment.

Pekka sat in her Kajaani City College office staring up at the ceiling, staring up through the ceiling. After a long stretch where the theoretical sorcerer scarcely moved, she bent to the paper in front of her and scribbled two quick lines and then, after a moment, another. A smile chased the abstracted expression she had worn from her broad, high-cheekboned face.

This is real sorcery, she thought. The other part, the part that goes on in the laboratory, that hardly matters. Without this, laboratory experiments would be nothing but guesswork.

Plenty of mages would have disagreed with her. That bothered her not at all. Her husband was one of those mages. That bothered her only a little. Leino was good at what he did. And I, by the powers above, am good at what I do, too, Pekka thought.

Through her open window, she heard a mason’s trowel scraping across mortar as he set bricks in place to repair a wall damaged in a laboratory accident. That was all most people knew about what had happened here a few weeks before. Pekka devoutly hoped it was all the Algarvians knew about what had happened here. She, though, she knew better.

After looking up at the ceiling a while longer, she wrote another line and slowly nodded. One step at a time, she and Siuntio and Ilmarinen were learning more about the energy that lay at the heart of the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity. The hole in the wall the mason was repairing was one of the lessons the master mages hadn’t learned quite so well as they thought they had.

“If we figure out how to release the energy where and when we need it, we can shake the world,” Pekka murmured.

Sometimes, thinking about what they might do terrified her and made her wish they’d never started down this ley line. But whenever she thought about what Mezentio’s wizards had done first against Unkerlant and then to Yliharma, the capital of her beloved Kuusamo, she hardened her heart. The Algarvians hadn’t needed the new sorcery to shake the world. Old-fashioned sorcery on a large and bloodthirsty scale had been plenty for that.

We won’t slaughter people to get what we want, Pekka thought. We won’t, no matter what. I would sooner see Kuusamo plunge into the Bothnian Ocean. And with this new sorcery, we won’t have to.

Kuusamo wouldn’t have to, if Pekka and her colleagues could gain the understanding they needed. If they didn’t, the land of the Seven Princes was liable to plunge into the sea. Pekka stared down at her latest sheet of calculations. If she couldn’t come up with answers fast enough … She’d never imagined that sort of pressure.

When someone knocked on the office door, she jumped in surprise. It was still light outside, but it would stay light outside the whole day through, or almost. Kajaani lay so far south, it made the most of summer.

Pekka opened the door. There stood Leino. “Another day done,” her husband said. He worked in neat chunks of time, not as mood and inspiration struck him.

“Let me pack up my things,” Pekka said. She didn’t leave calculations lying around the office, as she had in safer, happier, more innocent times.

“How’s it going?” Leino asked as they walked across the campus toward the caravan stop where they’d board the car that would take them close to their home.

“Pretty well,” Pekka answered. She gave her husband a wry grin. “I always seem to do my best thinking just before you come and get me.” The breeze, smelling of the sea, blew a lock of her coarse black hair across her face. She flipped it back with a toss of the head.

“Aye, that’s the way of it,” Leino agreed. “I hope I didn’t knock right in the middle of an inspiration, the way I have a few times.”

“No, it wasn’t too bad,” she said. “I’d just written something down, so I have a fair notion of where I ought to be going when I pick up in the morning.” She sighed. “Now I have to hope the ley line I’m traveling actually leads somewhere.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Leino said. “If it led anywhere more important, dear Professor Heikki would have to worry about a whole new laboratory wing, not just a chunk of wall.”

“Don’t say that.” Pekka looked around anxiously, though none of the other students and scholars on the walks was paying any attention to her husband and her. “Anyway, it’s not so much what we’re doing as controlling what we’re doing that’s turning into the biggest problem--aside from the department chairman, of course. And even she wouldn’t be so bad if she’d just leave me alone.”

“You’ll manage.” Leino sounded more confident than Pekka felt. A fair-sized crowd of people was waiting at the caravan stop. He fell silent. He didn’t worry about spilling secrets quite so much as she did, but he was no blabbermouth.

Somebody at the stop was waving a news sheet and exclaiming about what a splendid job Kuusaman dragons were doing against the Algarvians down in the land of the Ice People. “There’s good news,” Pekka said.

“Aye-for now,” Leino replied. “But if we poke the Algarvians down there, what will they do? Send more men across the Narrow Sea, most likely- they can do it easier than we can.” He paused. “Of course, everybody they send to the austral continent is somebody they can’t use against the Unkerlanters, so that might not be so bad after all.”

“Then again, it might,” Pekka said. “I know Swemmel’s an ally these days, but we’re mad if we fall in love with him. The only reason he’s better than Mezentio is that he wasn’t the one who started slaughtering people to make his magic stronger. But he didn’t wait very long before he started doing it, too, did he?”

“If he had waited, Cottbus probably would have fallen,” Leino said, and held up a hand before his wife could snap at him. “I know, he’s no great bargain. But we’d be worse off if the Algarvians weren’t fighting him, too, and you can’t tell me that isn’t so.”